The BlogEngine.NET 1.5 final release is now available for download at CodePlex. Since the RC1 was released a little more than a week ago, we have had some great feedback from the community - most of it positive, but there were also a few hiccups that needed to be fixed. The BlogEngine.NET team worked very hard on those fixes and I believe they were all taken care of properly.

Our main concern was around deployment on different server setups. That was basically why we decided to make the release candidate this time. You could run IIS 7 in Classic or Integrated Pipeline Mode with various restrictions or you could run IIS 6 maybe even more restricted. We got all those issues fixed by the help of the community. Thank you all for that.

New stuff in version 1.5

There are many new features, tweaks and improvements including:

Nested comments

Superb Windows Live Writer integration (including tags)

Latest TinyMCE text editor

Mono 2.4 support that just works

Doesn't screw with jQuery and Prototype anymore

Better database support out of the box

Higher performance

...and of course a lot of general improvements, tweaks and bug fixes

All in all a very stable, high performing and versatile product.

Getting started

If you’re new to BlogEngine.NET or interested in upgrading then take a look at Al Nyveldt’s screencast that shows you how easy it is.

Performance tweak

If you are using IIS 7 and want to squeeze every little inch of performance out of your BlogEngine.NET 1.5 installation, then you need to tweak the web.config a bit. In the bottom you’ll notice some elements (staticContent and httpProtocol) that are commented out. The reason for this is that some hosting providers don’t allow them, so that’s why they are commented out by default. If you enable them you will get an YSlow score of 92.

BlogEngine.NEXT

The future of BlogEngine.NET looks bright and we have a lot of ideas we want to implement. At this point we haven’t updated our roadmap, but we will soon so you can see the good stuff we are planning for.

Another point is that version 1.5 will probably be the last release supporting IIS 6 and .NET 2.0. We are not all clear on that, but personally I would like to only focus on IIS 7 and the upcoming IIS 7.5 because that will give us extra possibilities like extension-less URLs even on hosted environments.

I agree about leaving support in for IIS 6. While it wouldn't be an issue for me personally I think it would alienate a lot of users who rely on shared hosting.
I would like to see more features added to the next release of BE such as a photo gallery/slide show built in and commment administration. While there are great extensions for these I would like to see them built in by default.

I hope they keep it with IIS6 because I am hosting this blog on my Win2K3 box and I know that right now I could afford to upgrade to IIS7/Win2K8. I do like the version because it was painless install compared to 1.3
Keep up the work!

I am an avid SubText fan however did a bit of work with the RC over the weekend and I am highly impressed with BlogEngine.net. I will definitely be recommending it in the future to anyone looking for a easy to use and simple blog engine. Well done on a great product and the new release.

Uh! At first I thought.. "great.. new version.. very fine.." but then I read your comment about "last release supporting IIS6".
Think very carefully about that! Targeting .net &gt; 2.0 is okay, but please still support IIS6! I think there are a lot of people still using IIS6, because there aren't so much Win2008 Hosts out there!

hi there,
first of all, I am truly impressed with the newer version of BlogEngine.NET 1.5. Great work! if you guys are looking to host your BlogEngine.NET 1.5 on Windows Server 2008 platform, you may consider ASPHostCentral.com (http://www.asphostcentral.com). You can start hosting this blog from as low as $4.99/month and they provide direct installation via the control panel as well.
Hope this helps...

Mads,
You guys are doing a great job in creating and maintaining .NET's own blog engine.
Three cheers for u!!
But please dont make the next versions specific to IIS7 or above. Lot of hosting providers wont move to IIS7 in the near future and we wont be able to try it out. Please focus on implementing cool Ajax stuff like extensions in Ajax control toolkit etc. in the front end. That will attract a lot of people..
Thanks again for providing such a wonderful free product.

Didn't make it in this release, but in the next version there is going to be comment manager based on commerntor extension with pluggable interface for custom filters and anti-spam services. Your input is very welcome.